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In the troubled British Empire of 1830s, an apparently new strategy for approaching empire, with its ‘other’ races, became widespread. These ideas informed abolition in the slave colonies, the proposed reform of the Canadas, and shaped how the first big imperial expansion of the Victorian age, the colonization of New Zealand, was undertaken. Championed by a small but influential cadre of ‘Colonial Reformers’, but popular with people as different as Tories and Whigs, missionaries and businessmen, in New Zealand these reformist impulses inspired ‘racial amalgamation’, where a single colonial...

In the troubled British Empire of 1830s, an apparently new strategy for approaching empire, with its ‘other’ races, became widespread. These ideas informed abolition in the slave colonies, the proposed reform of the Canadas, and shaped how the first big imperial expansion of the Victorian age, the colonization of New Zealand, was undertaken. Championed by a small but influential cadre of ‘Colonial Reformers’, but popular with people as different as Tories and Whigs, missionaries and businessmen, in New Zealand these reformist impulses inspired ‘racial amalgamation’, where a single colonial political and legal community would be forged by intermarrying and intermixing different races. This was heralded as a new era of systematic and humane colonization. Though in conception and implementation this strategy was gravely flawed, the idea of racial amalgamation proved incredibly durable, popular and important.